Our good schools today are much better than the best schools of yesterday. When I was your age and a pupil in school, our teachers... were our enemies.Can any thing ... be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to e...ffect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not thanks, not prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our ...communication with the infinite,--but glad and conspiring reception,--reception that becomes giving in its turn, as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and infancy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Praise is a more ingenious, concealed, and subtle kind of flattery, that satisfies both the giver and the receiver, though by very... different ways. The one accepts it as a reward due to his merit; the other gives it that he may be looked upon as a just and discerning person.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience...--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »